Under This Terrible Sun

by Under This Terrible Sun (retail) (epub)

  * * *

  Duarte woke him up a couple of hours later; they had bought pizza and Coca-Cola. The news was on TV, so Danielito chose to eat while thumbing through some Reader’s Digest magazines he had taken from the pile in the bathroom. He sat down on the floor, a little away from the mattress. At some point Duarte touched his shoulder.

  “That’s the one I was telling you about,” he said, pointing at the TV with a half-eaten slice of pizza.

  On the screen was an elephant, apparently the elephant Duarte had mentioned, surrounded by a rectangle of, he figured, no more than twenty by ten meters of dry earth. In one corner, the animal was eating half-heartedly, choosing the best bits from a small heap of droopy fruit. The newscaster on the show reported that, after a lot of care, the state of the elephant’s health was improving notably. And, in fact, it was dancing. Or, better said, it never stopped moving its feet.

  “It’s not that it’s dancing. It gives little kicks, see,” said Duarte. “She’s got a lot of spirit, there. If she weren’t so old the kicks would be faster. They’ve tortured her for who knows how long, and she still gives back fear with all she’s got, poor thing, with the little she has.”

  Danielito was happy that the elephant was better. Duarte was a little stoned, and he went on talking.

  “I love it, I’d take her to my house. And you know what I’d do: I’d hit her with electricity, beat her up every day. Until the night came when she couldn’t take any more, like the elephants in India.”

  “You mean you’d see if it would come and knock at your door one day.”

  “Ha ha, yes, yes,” said Duarte. “Still, this one won’t be knocking at anyone’s door any more.”

  “And if that happened,” asked the other man, “if it came and knocked at your door, would you open it?”

  Duarte let out a laugh.

  “No, of course not, he he. Not even drunk. Never. You’re crazy.”

  Chapter 38

  It was nighttime and Cetarti was in the middle of the ocean, in a small fishing boat, during high season for Humboldt squid fishing. The owner of the boat was with him; Cetarti could feel his presence but he never physically entered the scene. The man was explaining to him that they were above a shoal of sardines and that the squids were eating. The sea was calm and silence reigned. Looking into the depths, you could see the discontinuous green shine of thousands of phosphorescent eyes flashing in a frenzy of predation.

  “They eat ferociously—they are tortured by hunger. If we fell into the water now, we wouldn’t even last two minutes.”

  The boat rocked sharply, and its owner’s hand grabbed hold of his shoulder and started to shake him. Cetarti tried to hold on to whatever he could so he wouldn’t fall into the water. The boat owner shook him harder; Cetarti was terrified and grabbed the man’s arm.

  “Eh, what’s up with you.”

  He opened his eyes and it took him a few fractions of a second to recognize Duarte, who was shaking him to wake him up. He said nothing was wrong, he was just dreaming. Duarte told him to get ready, they were leaving in half an hour. Cetarti stretched his limbs and went to the bathroom to wash his face. When he came out, he crossed paths with the giant, who was bringing the empty cot out to the garage. Duarte was in the woman’s room, dressing her in a tailored suit that looked a little large on her. Cetarti went back to the kitchen and turned on the TV: it was six in the morning. After a bit Duarte came in, dressed in a very nice blue suit and shined shoes. The other man made a couple of trips to load things into the ambulance. Finally he came into the kitchen too and said all right, everything was ready. He put on white overalls. Both of them were pretty somber. Duarte handed the other pair of overalls to Cetarti and told him to put them on.

  “You’ll be in the back, but just in case.”

  Duarte went to the woman’s room and brought her out to the ambulance, she walked like a sleepwalker. Cetarti packed a bag with a change of clothes, the brick of marijuana, and the roll of bills secured with a rubber band, just in case. Duarte sat behind the wheel of the ambulance and the woman went in the middle. The big guy asked Cetarti for the keys to the garage, helped him get settled in the back of the ambulance, and took care of opening and closing the door.

  The trip to Villa María seemed a bit long because they travelled by back roads, but Cetarti had a good enough time: he smoked as they drove, blowing the smoke out a little open window, and he distracted himself with the continuous flow of the landscape the whole way there. He thought about going away, he didn’t yet know where, but going away. They arrived a little before twelve thirty and parked the ambulance in front of the bank. Duarte got out with the woman; he was carrying a leather briefcase in one hand (probably the same briefcase Cetarti had seen at the police station, the first time they’d met) and with the other he held on to the woman to support her. Duarte looked in the back window and told Cetarti to close it until they left town. Cetarti closed it almost all the way, but he left a little crack so he could spy as the two of them crossed the street and went into the bank, with a little difficulty due to a revolving door. He heard movements in the front seat, and he deduced that the other man was moving the driver’s seat back. He also heard him turn on the radio. They took a little more than half an hour to come back, and by then he had gotten bored with spying through the window and had closed it completely; he realized what was happening from the sound of the doors and the rocking of the vehicle. He didn’t hear Duarte and the other man talking, and the woman was babbling something, but he couldn’t understand what she was saying. The big man started the van and they were on their way again.

  * * *

  After two hours of traveling, he felt the ambulance stop. He looked out the little window: they were at a fairly deserted service station in some small town. The back door opened and Duarte’s smiling face appeared, much more relaxed than in the morning. Duarte got inside and took a roll of fifty-dollar bills from his pocket and handed it to him. Cetarti stuck it in his bag without counting it. He asked Duarte where they were.

  “Sacanta, that’s it. It’s the closest to Córdoba we’re going to get. I think it’s best for you to get out here.”

  He said that they were stopping to put the woman in the back and to get something to eat at the barbecue joint next to the station; he asked if Cetarti wanted to eat lunch, saying they would drop him at the bus station afterwards. Cetarti was hungry, so he accepted and got out with his bag. The other two men took the woman out of the front of the van and put her in the back, tying her to the cot and connecting her to the oxygen tank. Then the giant took the van to fill up on diesel, and meanwhile Duarte and Cetarti walked the twenty meters to the restaurant. They sat down at a table close to the TV. Duarte ordered barbeque for three and French fries, a bottle of wine, and a large Coca-Cola. Cetarti ordered beer. They ate without talking much; his table-mates were relaxed, but each was caught up in his own activity—Duarte watching TV and the other thumbing through the newspaper. Cetarti didn’t have much to say either, so he just enjoyed the food and the gentle intoxication brought on by the beer. He decided he wasn’t going to go back to Córdoba. He asked Duarte if they were returning to Lapachito now, and Duarte said yes.

  “Can I go with you? From Lapachito, I’ll go to Resistencia and then keep traveling from there.”

  “And where are you going.”

  “I don’t know. But I’m not going back to Córdoba.”

  He said it was no problem if they didn’t want to, but if they would take him he would save on the tickets. The other two looked at each other, and Duarte said yes, but the only thing was that he would have to keep riding in the back of the van, with the woman. Cetarti told them that was perfectly fine, and thanks very much. He didn’t eat any more, but he finished his beer, ordered another, and asked where the bathroom was.

  Chapter 39

  “We’ll rub this one off along with the old lady, tonight in Santiago. His penny-pinching fucked him,” Duarte told him in a low voice, whe
n Cetarti got up to go to the bathroom. “When we stop, you get out, open the door for him, and tell him you have to get the old lady out and ask him to help with the cot. It’ll be three grand more for each of us and no one saw a thing.”

  Danielito nodded his head. He thumbed through the newspaper looking for sales on trips to Brazil, but there was nothing.

  * * *

  Past Sebastián Elcano, a little more than a hundred kilometers before the border with Santiago del Estero, evening started to fall. Duarte told him he was dead tired and wanted to sleep a little. They stopped on the side of the road and changed places. After a while he was snoring, sleeping soundly. Danielito waited a while longer, and when it was completely dark he opened the ambulance window and lit a joint he had in the pocket of his overalls. The air was pleasant and he was enjoying the silence, or more like the white noise of the wind coming in through the window, and every once in a while the sound of insects exploding against the windshield. When he crossed the border he was feeling pretty high, and he was overcome by a feeling of well-being that was unusual even in that state. He turned on the radio and listened with his mind almost blank. The van’s headlights lit up twenty meters ahead on low and one-fifty on high. Since there was little traffic (only every once in a long while did they meet another vehicle), he left them on high. At a certain point he discovered that there was something at the end of the cone of light projected by the headlights. The shape got a little closer: it was a cow. Danielito thought about the mathematical possibilities of meeting a cow on the middle of a deserted road in Santiago del Estero. He knew he was going fast (he looked at the speedometer: 120 kilometers per hour) and that he had to start to brake or see if the cow was moving, so he could get around it. After meditating on it a little he decided to brake, but by the time he found the pedal the cow was already almost on top of the van. The last thing Danielito saw was, precisely, the cow’s face, which looked him almost in the eyes from a distance of two meters away, with an expression that was peaceful and (it seemed to him, though he didn’t quite manage to formulate the thought) with a mild curiosity.

  Chapter 40

  Cetarti recovered consciousness and little by little grasped the situation: the woman’s body was on top of him, and the ambulance was turned upside down. Everything was silent and only the slight noises of the engine could be heard: the crunching of metal losing heat, liquids that bubbled or dripped. The woman’s body was warm but broken, with no muscular tension at all. He remembered her all covered with vomit, and he pushed her off of him with a gesture of disgust. He crawled to the door. He opened it from inside and climbed out. There was a full moon and no clouds, so he could see perfectly even though the ambulance’s lights had gone out in the crash. They were a dozen meters from the highway, on the side of a kind of mountain valley. They must have rolled a couple of times in order to end up there. He stretched, there was a muted pain in the outside of his right arm and leg, but it was bearable. He walked to the front of the van. Duarte’s large friend was undoubtedly dead, his head destroyed in a collision with the windshield. The door on Duarte’s side wasn’t there, and neither was Duarte: most likely he had been thrown out in one of the rolls. Cetarti looked around: if he was out there, he hadn’t gotten up. On the inside of the cabin roof (that is, on the floor) was the briefcase Duarte had been carrying when he came out of the bank. He opened it: there was a pile of rolls of bills, about as many as Duarte had given him in Sacanta. He returned to the back of the van and retrieved his bag, emptied the contents of the briefcase into it, and walked away, keeping distance between him and the road so he wouldn’t be seen if anyone stopped. As he got further away from the accident site, he gradually went up to the roadside. He came to a green sign that told him the nearest town was Atamisqui, nine kilometers away.

  Chapter 41

  At the Atamisqui terminal, Cetarti got a bus to Resistencia. Once there, he waited two hours and took another bus to Formosa. In Formosa he rested for a night at a hotel downtown, and the next day he crossed to Alberdi, Paraguay, in a speedboat. Twenty-four hours later, he was on the bridge that was the border between Ciudad del Este and Foz do Iguazú. He had bought a can of Coca-Cola at the last kiosk before the border, and he drank it on the middle of the bridge, leaning against the cement railing on one of the little concrete balconies that looked over the river. Then he threw the can over the edge. He stood still, watching the aluminum container as it fell; at this height, it would take more than a minute to reach the bottom, and Cetarti thought, for a bulk of the right weight and shape, the water’s surface would be as hard as pavement. The can hit the water and was carried away on the current. Cetarti walked away from the ledge and kept walking toward Brazil. He remembered the axolotl he had left at his brother’s house: it was going to starve to death. He remembered what they had told him at the vet’s: axolotls can fast for up to a week. When had it eaten last? Four days ago, probably. He imagined it at that moment, settled at the back of the fish tank, in the darkness of the shuttered house, wondering in its crude way at what moment a blurry shadow would come to scatter food over the surface of the water, and perceiving the emptiness and slow lightness of its body, emptier and lighter with each passing day.

  …

  About the author

  Carlos Busqued was born in the northern Argentinian province of Chaco in 1970. He has produced the radio programmes Vidas Ejemplares, El otoño en Pekín, and Prisionero del Planeta Infierno; and he contributes to the magazine El Ojo Con Dientes. He currently lives in Buenos Aires. Under This Terrible Sun is his first novel.

  Footnotes 1

  Footnotes

  1

  First Images of Live Giant Sea Monster Tentacles: The animal struggled for hours and left one behind on the hook.

  Tokyo (Agency): A team of Japanese scientists has managed to capture the first images of a giant squid swimming in open waters in the Sea of Japan. The specimen, which is estimated to be around eight feet long, was seen at nine hundred meters deep, and seems to be much more aggressive than previously thought.

  The giant squid is one of the most enigmatic animals on the planet, and, of course, one of the most sought after. The only previous specimens were found dead, and never before have images been taken of one in its natural habitat. In order to locate the giant squids, the team of Japanese scientists traveled to the North Pacific, where there is a large population of sperm whales, the only natural predators of these invertebrates. They placed twenty buoys from which photographic cameras hung at a depth of one thousand meters. They had attached a hook with bait to each camera. The cameras stayed in a vertical position, snapping photographs every four seconds during sessions of four hours. Finally, a giant squid attacked one of the cameras. After an initial assault in which one of its tentacles was speared by a hook, it disappeared from the frame for around twenty minutes. For the next eighty minutes, the animal thrashed about, trying to escape, even releasing jets of ink that impeded visibility. The first attack was so powerful that the camera was dragged six hundred meters further down, although squid and camera later returned to the initial thousand meters.

  After some hours of struggling with the hook, one of the squid's feeding tentacles broke off and stayed attached to the hook, while the animal managed to escape. The tentacle, five and a half meters long, was recovered by the scientists once the camera reached the surface, and it was found that the suckers were still active, and were trying to trap the fingers of the scientists who touched it.

  Footnotes 2

  2

  CANTABRIAN TRENCHES: ON THE HUNT FOR GIANT SQUID!

  An immature specimen of Architeuthis Dux beached in Kyoto. In spite of efforts to keep it alive, the animal died of anoxia a few hours later. It measured 6.20 meters long and weighed 220 kg.

  On October 20th the "Kraken Expedition" from Castro Urdiales will weigh anchor with a team of scientists from the National Oceanographic Institute and technicians from the TV production company Gaia Films. The expedition will s
et sail for the Carrandi trenches in the Cantabrian Sea, situated a few miles off the Spanish coast. They will remain there for two weeks, exploring the depths of the abyss, a habitat almost as unknown to man as the surface of Mars. They hope to be able to film the creature for the first time in its natural habitat, a creature that until now has never been seen alive: the largest invertebrate in the animal kingdom, known as the giant squid or Architeuthis Dux (its scientific name, meaning "prince of the old squids"). Little is known about the lives of these colossal cephalopods, which were already known to Norwegian fisherman in the 16th Century, when they were called Kraken. This is not the first attempt to catch them alive on film: two years ago, National Geographic fruitlessly spent millions of Euros trying to capture images of the mysterious giant. In that attempt, they placed harnesses with cameras on the backs of sperm whales (the only natural predators of the Architeuthis). The endeavor failed in part due to the impenetrable darkness of the abyss, and in part because the cetaceans freed themselves from the annoyance of the cameras by rubbing their backs together. This time, the deed will be attempted by placing three buoys that delimit a triangular area of the ocean. A camera will be suspended at a depth of between five and eight hundred meters. Fiber optic cables will connect the cameras to a machine in the buoy that will store the continuous images of the surroundings and, send them to on to the ship. A fourth camera, this one a video camera, will hang from the ship, as well as two remote-controlled submarines, similar to the ones that were used to explore the wreck of the Titanic. A living adult specimen of this species has never been captured. The largest specimen that has been preserved up to now measured ten meters long and weighed 492 kilos. However, the beaks that have been found in the vomit of dying sperm whales, and from the diameter of the suckers found on the skin of some cetaceans, it is speculated that they can reach up to thirty meters long and weigh over a ton.